hello we are new to ITIL. We are in the process of setting up new service Desk software and in doing so we are also using the ITIL methodology to set this up. One place that we are getting stuck is figuring out what or how we should define the IMPACT and Urgency. Can anyone just give some examples of how you have defined IMPACT and URGENCY.

example

Urgency: amount of time user can be down or without service
Impact: amount of users without service.

Impact
Measure of the business criticality of an Incident, Problem or Request for Change. Often equal to the extent of a distortion of agreed or expected Service Levels.

Urgency
Measure of the business criticality of an Incident or Problem based on the impact and on the business needs of the Customer.

Both came from the ITIL Glossary. You can get that for free at the best practice web site

In other words impact means how is the service being affected by ...
In other words urgency means how critical is it to get the impacted service back to full service_________________John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Indeed it goes like urgency+impact=Priority. Important is that we have something like classifications in place . We can have something like gold, silver and bronze classified for the applications which are linked with revenue and which are used widely in the organization .Based on the metallic gategory we can develop a RTO ( Recovery time objective )matrix. This means that a Gold category application which has a lower RTO than silver and bronze and therefore incidents related to gold application will have a higher urgentcy+impact leading into a high priority . Director's excel crash can have a high urgency but low priority. We need to be careful with assigning a priority of an incident as the ITSM tools nowadays are smart enough and send alerts across the who's who in the company .

I am the manager for the Global Helpdesk for my organization which is a BPO & my team handles calls from 25 centers worldwide. The common practice we follow is thus:

if more than 30% of users are affected - Priority 1
if more than 10% & less than 30 % users affected - Priority 2
if more than 0% & less than 10% users affected - Priority 3
if it is a non-business impacted issue - Priority 4

My team also follows an escalation matrix based on the priority of the incidents. Also, a predefined SLA of response time & resolution time based on the priority of the issue is also followed.